Brought me to and brought to me a solstice service, in memory of the ones we lost this year. For me, my beloved, my lover and my friend. For Raleigh and Daniel, their father and best playmate. For the art world, a consummate portraitist and sculptor extraordinaire. For over 300 G/T students in Kentucky, their coconspirator and best teacher. Sweetheart, we miss you. We honor your memory. Your candle burned the brightest on this, the darkest day of the year.
Remember these readings: John 1 (word) , Genesis 1 (light) , Exodus 13 (pillar of cloud, pillar of fire--theophany!), Isaiah 60 (radiance), Luke 1 (magnification).
My friends Donnie and Monte played magnificently. The music was such a soul solace, the darkness of the chapel and darkness outside made my own darkness less lonely, and the stained glass bleeding in the candlelight was another form of tears. Everything helped. It was such a relief to sit in the shadows, in silence, where tears weren't something that shameful but something that cauterizes and heals.
I watched the moon turn blood-red this morning, and I remember that among the bloodstone's properties is the ability to open locked doors. I look for doors to open, and I ask for courage.
(PS I know that I am not a good person when I review these verses and wonder why they never read this verse from Isaiah 60: A multitude of camels shall cover you. That doesn't sound like a blessing to me. It's kind of like the mournful, beautiful Rivers-of-Zion psalm that ends with dashing your enemies' skulls against rocks).
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Another light in the darkness: I was also nudged to find my chapbook, A Walk Through the Memory Palace on a Year's Best list! (The link is above).
"A Walk Through the Memory Palace, by Pamela Johnson Parker, Phoenicia Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-0978174965.
Artful and precise in their construction, these poems won Johnson Parker the Chapbook Prize from qaartsiluni, a small press doing some of the most innovative issues on the web (and, in the interest of full disclosure, a publisher of some of my own work.) I include the Memory Palace here because I believe it will please those who favor poems that catalogue, parse, and sliver the human experience in ways that reflect like shards of glass. While I prefer poetry that is more accessible and wholistically illuminative, I couldn’t help but admire this poet’s skill. I know why it was chosen, and I think it’s important to all writers to examine carefully that which challenges as well as pleases."
What a lovely review! I like that my poems sliver the human experience. (Maybe Angelina can play me in the action movie).
If you'd like to read and/or listen to some of these parsing poems (Parseltongue?), go here:
Memorypalace.walk.com
Visit She Writes
2 comments:
Before I click on the link...Pamela, what a bestowing of honor, such a review and the "Best" designation. May we have someone other than Angelina play you (a personal prejudice, it IS your movie.) Thank you for sharing some comfort found on the solstice, for it has not be a year of ease for you. xo
Thank you, Marylinn!
(That was a joke about Angelina! She stars in most of the action movies right now, and I think it has something to do with her outsize Skeletor hands).
If I could have anyone play me, it would be Carol Kane, whom I looked like--a bit--back in the Latka's Wife days. She is funny and sassy and made a most memorable fairy in Scrooged.
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